There were special meetings for discussion of diverse subjects, including the mistakes of congress, advice to the President, the tariff, the oppressions of capital, the tyranny of labor, prohibition, the negro question, restriction of immigration, Shakespeare criticism, the Wrongs of Ireland, and a host of other things that generated heat and lasting acrimony. The meetings sometimes approached turbulency when some over-zealous orator gave vent to unpopular ideas, or made statements that seemed to justify somebody in the audience in calling him a liar. Few participants ever left convinced of anything in particular, except the correctness of the opinions they had brought with them. We found a gathering of about a hundred club members and numerous small boys in the grove back of the church. We strolled about through the crowd and I was introduced by my companions to a number of their old friends. Bill was the official head of the club and deservedly popular. To the small boys he was a deified personage. His constitutional title was “Chief Gobbler,” and he bore it with easy grace and a quiet air of _noblesse oblige_. His opinion prevailed on club matters, except when Sophy Perkins was in contact with the situation, and this was most of the time. Sophy was the secretary, treasurer, general manager, board of directors, and, to her mind, constituted the greater part of the membership, although her duties were supposed to be merely clerical. All her life she had yearned for something besides her husband to regulate and superintend, and the Turkey Club had been a godsend. She was a somewhat attenuated female, on the regretful side of fifty. Her physiognomy was repelling and expressed characteristics of an alley cat. There was a predatory gleam in her narrowly placed greenish eyes. They bespoke malignant jealousy and relentless cupidity. She seemed enveloped by an atmosphere—vague and indefinable—that prompted cautious and immediate retirement from her vicinity. In private conversation she was commonly referred to as “The Stinger,” and the soubriquet seemed to have been justly earned by a badly speckled record of secret intrigue and underhanded methods. Anonymous letters, petty trickery and duplicity in manifold forms were included in the misdeeds that had been tacitly laid at Sophy’s door. She was of that female type that demands all male privileges, in addition to those of her own sex, and she often took advantage of the fact that she was a woman to do and say things that she would probably have been knocked down for if she had been a man—one of the most contemptible forms of cowardice.